Is TV’s Recent Golden Age Waning?

By ROB PATTERSON

The last two decades have seen TV forever erase FCC Chairman Newton Minnow’s 1961 condemnation that the medium was a “vast wasteland.” Or maybe not …

Such is the conundrum of TV here in 2022. There was a time when, for me, a boomer raised on TV, it felt a bit like a wasteland. It was the early 1990s. I was paying, if memory serves me, somewhere in the neighborhood of $70 to $80 a month for basic cable with some premium channels. I would be sitting in my living room easy chair clicking through channels and finding myself bereft of anything that really grabbed my attention. So I cut the cord with cable.

I was fortunate. I had a world-class video/DVD rental store some eight blocks from my home with deep catalog, a “Director’s Wall” for those of us who are auteurists, a global treasure chest of foreign films, row on row of TV series, cult and documentary and more. Plus staff that loved movies, Austin, TX is a cineastes’ town; witness that we have two major film festivals and a slew of smaller yet excellent ones. And there was another video store with even more rarities. I did not suffer from a lack of home visual entertainment.

Yet by the end of the decade – or maybe more prophetically said, turn of the century – I turned my cable back on. Specifically due to the arrival of “The Sopranos.” Long-form serial TV with cinematic quality in the imaginative and often edgy topics, sharp and smart writing, superb acting, canny directing and more had arrived on cable; shows like “Oz,” “The Wire,” “Mad Men,” “Breaking Bad,” to cite some early landmarks. Even network TV got into the act with “Friday Night Lights.”

As streaming arose to challenge cable, the initial plethora spawned further gems of varying sizes and colors. Just a little digging, touts from friends and enthusiastic Facebook posts were all that was needed to find something serial that was worthy of a binge – the ultimate measure of TV potency, so good you want to jump through its looking glass or tumble down its rabbit hole into the whole other world or existence. Witness “Game of Thrones” for a truly transformational example of that.

It’s been a rather wonderful era for those of us who enjoy TV. And after a long hard day as a writer and editor of putting creative content into the box of wires, I do so enjoy being able to sit (or lay) back and have another box of wires serve me up entertainment.

But of late I’ve found myself somehow less enthralled, even if I have a fair amount of series in the old-school network mode (scores of episodes throughout the year) I watch throughout the week. And I still find more limited-run shows of quality that merit my liking and praise.

It could be the result of pandemic lockdown. For two years-plus now this already homebound freelancer has left the house even less than usual. Hence I’ve watched more TV as I’ve gone out way far less to hear music, see films in a theater, even just hit a bar for some drinks and socializing.

At the same time, the pandemic put a lot of TV series and film production on hold. So perhaps there’s been less new projects coming to fruition to enjoy.

There’s now somewhere over 200 streaming channels. Hence, a various maw needing content either gleaned from the past or created anew. And I do feel like the amount of new quality series has dipped downward.

Even the best result of Minnow’s wasteland complaint more than half of a century ago, public television, has become something of its own over-served ghetto of well-intentioned TV for people with an intellect.

All I can say right now is we shall see. All artistic movements have their rise to peak moments and then the inevitable drop-off. Just like so much of life in general, only time will tell.

Populist Picks

TV Series: “We Own This City” – Created and produced by David Simon, the primary force behind “The Wire,” and “Wire” writer/producer and noted Washington, DC-based crime fiction author George Pelacanos, this six-episode gem is a true-life tale that looks at a corrupt Baltimore police task force and its effects on the city’s plagued law enforcement and criminal justice systems. With a feel, look and vibe similar to “The Wire,” it’s a well-rendered slice of modern American urban life and its issues.

Album: “Wet Leg” – Two wildly yet innocently talented lasses from the Isle of Wight who are on the lips of just about all the musical cognoscente, and deservedly so. Their enchanting sound reaches back into the charms of early new wave rock, and with uber-catchy songs that can raise the blasé and mundane into high and mirthful musical pop art, they’re the sweetest sort of stars on the rise.

Rob Patterson is a music and entertainment writer in Austin, Texas. Email orca@prismnet.com.

From The Progressive Populist, August 15, 2022

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